Glittering Gold
by lalunaticscribe
Summary: 1920s historical AU. 1st Person POV. Co-written with press34. On reflection over the years I would think back and hear again the singing compulsion of his voice; a promise of a gay sweet song just a while since, and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.
1. Prologue

_**Glittering Gold**_

 _ **An LLS Production**_

 _ **A/N: So, my friend and I got talking, and we thrashed out a large portion of the plot between us, so I credited her as well. That being said, I'm the one writing most of this fic.**_

 _ **Since Kubo Mitsurō chose not to discriminate about the things people love in the actual YOI universe, I decided not to either. People can love freely in the idealised bubble of this fic. Furthermore, this story is taking place in the wake of tragedy already, so let there be happiness in this world too.**_

 _ **\- LLS**_

* * *

 **Prologue: Three Sheets to the Wind**

In the year 1918, following the Armistice of the Great War, my parents sent me to _Kyudai_ as dreams of becoming a _danseur_ had to be set aside in the name of practicality. Following the end of my second year, I left school and found work with the Mitsui offices, having polished my proficiency in English and Russian alongside my native language in finishing school. My work, profitable enough to set aside a small amount for my parents, took me to the Mitsui offices in Nikolayevsk-on-Amur in 1920.1 Having resigned myself to staying there, fate clearly did not agree with the current path of my life. In June 1920, Japanese and Russian alike were massacred by partisan forces of the Communists – this would be called by the newspapers the Nikolayevsk incident.

The campaign brought honours and promotion to many, but for others it had nothing but misfortune and disaster. Few returned alive from the maw of the Black Dragon River.2 Only sheer luck in the form of a White Army soldier, or so I was told by the Russian nurses, had carried me over the estuaries and the Mamiya Strait from the carnage of Tryapitsyn's Siberian butchery to safe haven in Sakhalin. Weak from the prolonged hardships which I had undergone, here I rallied in convalescence as my nurses commented upon the kindly soul who had paid upfront for my care in the midst of Russian hospitality. I had already improved so far as to be able to walk about the wards, and even to bask a little upon the verandah, when I was struck down by enteric fever.

For months, my destiny was tossed in the game of dice between life and death. When at last I came to myself and became convalescent, I was so weak and emaciated that a medical board determined that not a day should be lost in sending me back. I was dispatched accordingly with, by happy coincidence, the IJN ship _Hibiki_ , and landed a month later at Sapporo Bay, my health irretrievably ruined, with permission from a paternal company to spend the next nine months in attempting to improve it.

When I came back to Hasetsu at long last, I felt that I wanted the world to be uniform forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. For three years I languished, invalidated from my body and soul by some nerve-wracking impulse of the spirit. Until a turn of fate carried me across the eastern seas towards America, and across the New World itself into New York, New York, where I met the sole exemption of my anguish towards life and all its tempests and disappointments:

Viktor.

Why?

Well; he was something gorgeous, with his heightened sensitivity to the promises of life. A Paris who celebrated as if the world were promised to him by the triple goddesses instead of Aphrodite alone; at least, I think that is the sentiment borne of people when they consider Viktor Nikiforov. Viktor was a perennial surprise, a Pandora's jar that sheltered the thoughts of my future from foreboding. Viktor represented everything which we call love, gliding across the rink of Madison Square Garden in a dance of frost and carved figures. What Viktor held was, to me, an extraordinary gift for hope; a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person, and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.

* * *

In my younger and more vulnerable years my mother gave me some advice that has drifted on the sea of old memory until now.

"Should you lose your way," she had told me, "remember all the people in this world who love you."

My father nodded and smiled with her the day I remembered; it was when I was about to break the news of my impending sojourn across the eastern seas to them, only to find out that they had already known. "Yuuri," he spoke, the dialect of Saga harsh against the newly standardised Japanese we were supposed to learn. "Are you sure about leaving?"

My father had not fussed when his son, too quiet for the rough-housing of boys like Nishigori, spent more time under the tutelage of eternally youthful Minako-sensei than the practical schoolwork and athletics that was expected. My father has not fussed since the event at Nikolayevsk-on-Amur, which had ended in tragedy and adventure for which I could not recount on my life.

I could not breathe. "I've been sure since my return from _Kokuryūkō_."

His hands tightened on my hands there and then at the mention of the Black Dragon River. "Yuuri... have a safe journey, and come back to us."

My family have lived for three generations, or so my father claims, in the castle town of Hasetsu. The Katsuki, though not a high-born clan, have a tradition of descent from the _shinobi_ of the Nabeshima clan _daimyō_ , but any actual descent from the _samurai_ of Saga domain was debatable. With Hasetsu being traditionally neglected by the _daimyō_ in favour of Arita's Imari porcelain, and now neglected by His Imperial Majesty's government for same, our Katsuki family thus managed to leverage enough money to claim and maintain an _onsen ryōkan_ in this tiny castle town by the sea that was my hometown. This was how my grandfather had raised his family. This was how my father had raised my sister and I, and where my mother settled with her lot in life – excitingly, happily, cheerfully bustling about life with a smile to the world.

Her elder friend Okukawa Minako-sensei had no such plebeian ambitions. Thus she set out to become a _prima ballerine_ on the world stage, culminating in her appearance as Danseuse Étoile in the Paris Opera Ballet. Now, she had moved to New York, and bade her first student – me – to travel the world to assist her. It was by coincidence that I had recovered my strength and sought at the same time other ways to earn my keep, than return to the company who surely did not care as much for its employees, so my parents advised.

"I'm not interested," my elder sister remarked, insouciant in her absent writings to magazines and literary works to pay attention to what the Radical Feminists refer to as the 'exploitation of the female body in performance art'. "I'm too busy."

Perhaps she was right. In the beginning, woman might be the sun3; but, the fires of passion and inspiration for women's rights struck from Mari's literary talent could only be rivalled by the fires upon which the fruits of efforts she deemed insufficient fed upon within the hearth.

"Yuuri can put all that ballet training to use with Minako-san," Mari continued, and thus put an end to whichever of us siblings should brave the Pacific Ocean to America.

On hindsight, I suspect that I would have gone anyway. In the time that I was away, Hasetsu went from being the balmy and warm centre of western Japan to the edge of the world's web. Thus, when Minako-sensei sent her desperate request from the centre to the edge, I had already acquiesced before my mother had requested, and made ready to leave home again. The uncles and aunts of Hasetsu talked it over with the gravity of choosing a school, and Hasetsu turned itself out to see me off with grave, hesitant faces.

It was therefore with various delays that I came east – temporarily, I thought, in the late spring of '23. It was a warm season and I had just left a country of friendly trees. The practical thing was to find rooms in the city with Minako-sensei, but her ladies' boardinghouse was far more restrictive to the male than the female. Thankfully, a young man from Thailand with his darkroom near the dance studio suggested that we go halves on a house together in a commuting town. It was the first of many ideas from Phichit Chulanont – some great, some terrible, all of them spoken with friendly ease that I both envied and balked at.

"It'll be a great idea, old boy." How many requests turned dares would begin with that sentence, I did not know then.

Phichit had been sent down from Oxford, and was nominally working with a gratuity from his parents – teak, I gathered, had been generous with the funds that allowed him to cross the ocean and plains to New York. Upon his arrival, though, going halves on housing had become less of an option, and more of an actual necessity to survive with food in his belly.

Phichit found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty dollars a month. I had a dog – a poodle that was named Vicchan in a fit of whimsy – an old Dodge shared between us, and Mrs Cialdini who made the beds and cooked breakfast and muttered Sicilian curses to herself over the electric stove. Her son Celestino, so I noted, spent his time coaching people in the nascent sport of figure skating for the Olympics. I barely ever met him – my life shuttled between the cardboard house we now called home, and Minako-sensei's studio.

One fine day, when Phichit was called to the Hamptons on some party that I had refused entry citing further ill health, and Minako-sensei had gone sallying out for tea with her friends, it was lonely. I took Vicchan out for a constitutional, and to explore my environs. Little did I know that some man would stop me on the road outside of our cardboard shanty-house during my constitutional with Vicchan.

Viktor must never know this, but here, I thought then, was one of the handsomest specimens of humanity ever seen. No wonder the Europeans were so obsessed with the semblances of Greek gods. With his blue eyes hooded against the sun's intense glares and running a hand through his artfully tousled silver hair, he seemed to me a figure straight out of the European fairy tales – perhaps one of the Wilis of _Giselle_ fame.

An out-size poodle the colour of _café au lait_ bounded along beside him. Vicchan touched noses with his larger brethren, and placed his hindquarters close to my scuffed leather shoes, which turned my concerns from examining everything else towards worrying over upsetting my image before a passing stranger.

"How do you get to West Egg Village?" he asked, his voice so melliferous in the warming summer. "I'm Viktor. Ah, yes, this is Makkachin. He really likes your poodle."

I gave my greetings and walked with him as we exchanged words. This Greek god descended from the heavens furthered his introduction as Mr Viktor Nikiforov, an eternal wanderer after the seizure of St. Petersburg – "St. Petersburg?" "Not Petrograd, never Petrograd, Yuuri," – and Russia tearing itself apart, and that coincidentally, would I care to call for tea? How long had I been in this part of the world, so far from the Land of the Rising Sun?

I was lonely no longer – I was a guide, a pathfinder. With the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees – just like the fast movies – I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer breeze.

He left, and the summer breeze seemed to go with him. Perhaps I am not to speak to you—I am to think of you when I sit alone, or wake at night alone.

I would prefer not to be alone.

I kept this thought to myself, of course, as I realised that somehow, we had walked the rounds of West Egg only for Viktor to stroll into the Long Island palace beside my slum.

* * *

 _ **Critiquez, s'il vous plaît !**_

 ** _1 After the Meiji Restoration, Mitsui Group was among the enterprises that could expand to become Zaibatsu not simply because they were already big and rich at the start of modern industrial development. Mitsui itself was founded in 1876._**

 ** _2 The Amur River or Black Dragon River is the world's tenth longest river, forming the border between the Russian Far East and North-Eastern China._**

 ** _3 "In the beginning, woman was the sun" (「元始、女性は太陽であった」) – a reference to the Shinto goddess Amaterasu, and to the spiritual independence which women had lost. This is the title and opening line of early modern Japanese feminist Hiratsuka Raicho's "In The Beginning Woman Was The Sun"._**


	2. I

_**Glittering Gold**_

 _ **An LLS Production**_

* * *

 **I: Raise the Curtain**

The Katsuki, though not a high-born clan or particularly wealthy, have a tradition of descent from the shinobi of the Nabeshima clan daimyō, but any actual descent from the samurai of Saga domain was debatable. With Hasetsu being traditionally neglected by the daimyō in favour of Imari porcelain from the neighbouring province of Arita, and now neglected by His Imperial Majesty's government for the same reason, our Katsuki family thus managed to leverage enough money to claim and maintain an onsen ryōkan in this tiny castle town by the sea that was my hometown.

Here was where I grew up with Yuu-chan and Nishigori, and later, here was where Yuu-chan became Nishigori Yuuko-san upon her marriage to Nishigori Takeshi, whose father had struck it rich with shipping and then dabbling in American steel.

Here, this recounting of history really began on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Nishigori family.

* * *

To begin, though, perhaps I should give an outline, the _mise en scène_ that is expected to watch this farce unfold.

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York—and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the Long Island Sound.

Atop West Egg, the little house I shared with Phichit was squeezed between two huge places that rented for maybe twelve to fifteen thousand a season. Our house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound. Our own cottage was an eyesore; but it was a small eyesore tucked within a copse of trees that cut off the house from the rest of Long Island and the Long Island Sound, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of the neighbour's lawn, and the proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month after going halves.

The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—with a tower on one side, new under the raw ivy that had taken root over it at the arrangement of the gardener corps required to even maintain it, and a marble swimming pool set amidst more than forty acres of lawn and garden.

It was Viktor's mansion. Rather, as I didn't know Mr. Nikiforov at the time; it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. Phichit tells me that I have an unfair sense of space and aesthetics from Japan, but I must confess that the mansion I had described was astounding in the bad taste that was possible only in America.

Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of East Egg glittered along the water, and amongst them was where it unfolded; Ice Castle.

Yuuko Nishigori was two years my senior. She was the rare girl who made something for herself, even despite leaving Japan with Takeshi Nishigori, who had actually gone to Kyudai with her. Just after the war, they had left Japan to head east and build up their fortune from the Nishigori family's comparatively humble beginnings – Nishigori, among various physical accomplishments, had been the talk of Hasetsu after the news of his striking it rich in commodities reached our ears. Industry was of questionable use in the volcanic regions of Japan, and thus now the Nishigori fortune rested with his ability to ship oil and coal and steel back home.

At the moment, he had come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away; that he even resided in upper-class America at all marked how far the strides we have made are. It was hard to realise that men in my own generation, from my own country, were wealthy enough to do that.

Why Nishigori had brought his whole family here I don't know. They had spent a year in France, and then drifted wherever people were rich together from any corner of the globe. Either way, from the few telegrams I had exchanged with Yuuko about the triplets, their three daughters were certainly getting an international education. I would meet them face-to-face for the first time, after Minako-sensei cheerfully called me and demanded that I take the Dodge roadster I shared with Phichit to drive her.

"D- Drive?" I repeated, after the directive had been issued.

Her foot tapped a beat in a manner not unlike that of a Maxim gun. "Yes, Yuuri. _Drive_."

"I- I don't- Minako-sensei-"

"You have experience! How else am I supposed to make it to Long Island after closing up the studio?"

With the use of several precautions, and every prayer not to be caught by the police, I managed on that warm, windy evening to drive Minako-sensei over to East Egg to see two old friends.

Their house was even more elaborate than I expected: almost a perfect copy of the façade of a Japanese castle stood overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach, and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, with sundials and brick walks and gardens—finally stoppered when it reached the edge of the house by a boundary of white sand. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon to ventilate the Ice Castle – so named because it had apparently belonged previously to the refrigeration tycoon Coolie in whose business Takeshi had partnered with, and then died leaving an unprecedented will that denied his antecedents the property in favour of Yuuko and her daughters.

The aforementioned trio of ambushers knocked me over as I stepped foot inside behind Minako-sensei.

"You're thinner than in the picture!"

"Did you catch typhoid?"

"How was the war?"

Minako-sensei giggled. "You sure are having fun, Yuuri."

"Hey! Axel, Lutz, Loop, let him up!" Yuuko hustled over, elegant in her dinner gown with her riotous chestnut hair pinned into a French bun. "Sorry, Yuuri, they're excited to meet you..."

Time, wealth, and changed circumstances had not stripped the gaiety of her bearing; she was as happy and cheerful as my mother back home. Such was the Madonna of the Ice Castle.

"Yuuri!" Nishigori tackled me from behind, much like a black bear mauling a hapless tree. As I struggled out of his grip, I noted his stocky build, that he'd gotten a tan from the sun, and a haircut to his black hair. The distinctive Nishigori profile of square jawline, large nose, and thick eyebrows were still all present, though. "It's been so long!" His voice was loud and friendly – much like a bellowing whale off the shores of Hasetsu, when one deigned to stray closer.

"You never write," Yuuko continued after her husband. "You never call-"

"Sorry, Yuuko-san-"

"What's with that?! Call me Yuu-chan!" Her wide smile seemed to me very much like the statues of beckoning cats – and how true that assessment must seem, on hindsight. "You've never seen the girls, right?"

I knelt down to peer at them through the blur that myopia and plenty of concussions had cursed me with. "Uh, they've grown a lot."

"They're all taking ballet lessons with Minako-sensei now!" Yuu-chan continued. "Well, and you."

"Yuuri's going to take the smaller ballet classes," Minako-sensei chirped, which sent my stomach plummeting to somewhere around my feet. "I've got advanced students to prepare their recitals for- ah, Yuuri, have you ever skated? In Russia?"

"S- Skated?" I swallowed. A staccato beat echoed across my left temple, and my palms curled in.

"Yes, we've got an ice rink!"

"Papa, show Yuuri!"

"Yeah, show Yuuri the rink!"

"Isn't that man coming here-?"

"What? What man- Nishigori!" I protested. "Yuu-chan!"

"It'll be fine, he just wants to check out how to build an ice rink like Coolie." Yuu-chan gave a smile and waved. "Takeshi, you'll show Yuuri the rink with the girls and I'll start the tea with Minako-sensei!"

"Alright!" Nishigori grabbed my hand and, with great hirsute strength, dragged me along with three babbling girls. "Done it before, ice skating?"

"Er- yes, in Nikolayevsk- and Vladivostok." I hesitated. "But-"

"Well, you'll probably be a mite better. All that ice must be good for _something_. So, you're teaching ballet?"

"Y- Yes, with Minako-sensei..." I swallowed. "Maybe... I'll pick up another job?"

"Who with?"

I told him.

"Never heard of them," he remarked decisively.

I wilted. So my idea of setting up a small studio here, perhaps, was not as feasible as I had thought. "Oh."

"Don't you worry," he said, glancing down to his three identical daughters and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. "Plenty of chances, and if you fail here, London or Paris is always in need of talent. Here we are!"

And he pushed open a door.

A burst of cold air blew into my face and fogged my glasses, blurring my world into one of light combined with the span of a large, empty space surrounded by low barriers.

"See, old Coolie built up this little project as the latest advances in refrigeration technology," Nishigori started to lecture. "Meant for large-scale storage, if you think a meat locker isn't enough. Automate the whole procedure, his idea. Coolie couldn't get past cooling the floor, of course, and couldn't do anything but build this place – and then up and died, more's the pity. We got it, and we found this, and this, I tell you, is a neat place to hold all the ice parties and galas. Maybe put in a hockey arena, they're big on hockey here and up north in Canada."

The ice was clear and frozen solid. It invited one to step upon it, at which point a spiderweb of cracks was the only reassurance from the churning black dragon underfoot and-

"-skates?"

"Sorry?" I asked Nishigori.

He repeated his question. "I can lend you a pair of skates?"

"Oh, I-"

"Yuuri!" All three triplets, with their attentive looks and pleading gazes, resembled a litter of puppies such that I could only cave to their whims.

Therefore, I allowed Nishigori and his staff to pull out a selection of boots, measure my feet and then wait for a pair of suitably sharp blades to be screwed onto the soles. The whole charade, which took a while, had an audience of mainly five, watching with a solemnity to rival the English Changing of the Guards. With that said, I finally touched the ice, managing to skate across with the ease of mild experience.

The ice, to me, was an expanse of white, spreading like the estuaries of the Amur. The coils of the dragon raged with its patina of scales upon its wave-patterned skin. A hum, perhaps that of an operating machinery, permeated the air as I absently made my turns on the ice, the blades cutting through the frosted surfaces.

This is not the Amur.

I took a deep breath.

"-is it?"

"Eh?" The dragon has flown away, back to the edge of the world. "Yes, Nishigori?"

"How is it?" Takeshi asked me, his dark eyes glittering with some hidden mirth to match those of his three daughters. "Yuuko's spoilt the girls on stories of you. From her descriptions, they think that you can literally walk on water."

"I... I can't." My leg rose, and I made a lazy spin, laying back with my head dropped and the free leg _à la hauteur_. Ballet on ice seemed a treacherous proposition, even as I slid from second to fifth position, and _arabesque_ _en arrière_ , so that I was at the centre of the ice. _Balancé_ – down, up, down – and glide towards them, arm movements to righten myself.

A smattering of applause echoed, a beached whale slamming into an iceberg.

"That was amazing, Yuuri!" Yuuko had bounded in with Minako-sensei as I made those steps, and now she was fiercely giving her applause. "I told you! I told you our Yuuri was talented, Viktor!"

"So you have, Mrs Nishigori." The applause faded and the silver-haired spirit tilted his head in acknowledgement.

"Ah, this is Yuuri Katsuki, a family friend. And this is Minako Okukawa-sensei, my girls' teacher," Yuuko absently introduced me, with every word an added weight to the noose of embarrassment that she was inadvertently tightening around my neck. I did not know him well enough then, so I shall call him Mr Nikiforov, as I should have. "Yuuri, you've taken the house next to Mr Nikiforov's, right? This is your neighbour, Viktor Nikiforov. If you haven't changed much since coming to New York, you probably haven't been to introduce yourself to your neighbours. That's not good, Yuuri."

"That's not good, Mr Katsuki," Mr Nikiforov's voice was the whisper of the north wind against the softest of mink. "You should introduce yourself to your neighbours. How else then, other than pure coincidence, would I have known that I had such a charming and talented neighbour move into West Egg?"

* * *

Mr Viktor Nikiforov was an unexplainable man of wealth and taste. His twenty-seven years of age belied the immense wealth he had, to be able to own – yes, _own_! – a Long Island palace, on top of properties in California and London. He said all of this over tea with the Nishigori family, as part of his ongoing introduction into this particular social _milieu_.

"I say, I haven't seen you at one of my little parties," Viktor then started.

"I make it a point not to go where I'm not invited," was my only reply. Having committed my funds at least to rent and food, the sartorial budget was currently limited to the minimum needed for a bachelor dance-master to teach and still present as moderately dressed to the clients of Minako-sensei's dance studio. "As for _little_ parties..."

Minako-sensei and Yuuko both gave a soft cough. Nishigori chose to drown himself in his teacup as a method of expressing his complete disbelief.

The strains of music had been filtering from my neighbour's house through the summer, you see. Men and girls drifted like moths whispering through the night. On weekends, his Rolls-Royce and station-wagon did double-duty as omnibuses and party brothels, ferrying party after wild party to and from the city between nine in the morning and stretching long past midnight.

Phichit had been inside Mr Nikiforov's house by one of these parties. Half of Phichit's descriptions were too fantastic for fiction, and the other half were possibly figments of his imagination:

According to Phichit, in the afternoons when I was slaving away teaching the fifth position to moneyed heirs and heiresses, Mr Nikiforov's guests dived off of the tower of his raft, took the sun on his private beach, and drove motor-boats through the waters of the Sound. There was a machine in the kitchen, which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour – if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb. On buffet tables garnished with glistening side dishes, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs, ruled over by pastry pigs and dark gold turkeys. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that Phichit's party companions were too young to know one from another.

I could hardly believe that anyone could be so wealthy that a two-day affair involving an entire orchestra, perhaps a ball or two, and crates of illegal imported champagne and whiskey was _little_. This is in spite of evidence that on Mondays, a corps of servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears in repairing the ravages of the night before.

"I confess that I have been... rather busy."

I tried not to look at Mr Nikiforov lest my comparatively poorer financial straits be divined by my overly immoderate neighbour. "I am still paying off the fare to America."

"Oh! Which route did you take?" Mr Nikiforov immediately started. "I came to the New World by ship to Alaska, and then a coastal trip south to San Francisco before I took the Overland Route. That railroad is magnificent – not a patch on the Trans-Siberian Railway."

"I haven't seen it, but Russia is a big place. I came by way of Europe myself."

"You've been to Russia, Yuuri?" Mr Nikiforov seemed so excitable, and so interested – that for a moment the world was concentrated on me with an irresistible prejudice in my favour.

"I was in the Russian Far East."

"Oh, what a coincidence! I've been there. I hope Russia endeared herself?" Mr Nikiforov blinked at his teacup, held delicately between his fingertips.

"I'd rather not go back," I decided at last, rather than explain.

"The godless Communists aren't worth mentioning, I agree," Mr Nikiforov cheerfully agreed. "Terrible lot. Not that we were much better – I was in the White Guards, and before that the army."

"You were in the war?" Axel – she was wearing purple – piped up from the smaller table with hot tea and a selection of cakes and sweets.

Her blue-clad sister, Lutz, joined her. "Did you kill people?"

"Was it bloody, Mr Viktor?"

"Girls!" Yuuko exclaimed. "I'm so sorry, Mr Nikiforov, they're so nosy-"

"It's alright, always good to be curious," Mr Nikiforov dismissed as he took a lump of apricot jam onto his teaspoon and ate it. At my look, he pointedly took his tea – black, hot and straight – to drink.

"Do you miss Japan, Yuuri? What d'you miss about it?" Mr Nikiforov continued. "What are the local dishes like? The local sights? Perhaps... a lover?"

"Huh, no," I replied before I realised what he asked of me, and then I tried to pay more attention to the workmanship of Yuuko's table to no avail.

"Former lover?"

"Excuse me, Mr Nikiforov."

"Viktor, please. Yuuri- may I call you Yuuri?" The man was so charming that I could not find it in myself to resist leaning forward. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down – each speech an arrangement of notes in _improviso_. On reflection over the years I would think back and hear again the singing compulsion of his voice; a promise of a gay sweet song just a while since, and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

His face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth as he spoke next.

"The honour would be entirely mine," said Mr Viktor Nikiforov, "if you were to attend one of my little parties. Saturday?"

"I... have an event with Phichit," I hesitated.

While I am sure that the Chulanont party would arrive at Mr Nikiforov's house sooner or later, I was still rather at sea about Western etiquette. Minako-sensei might have put me in her examination across of Yuuko's table, knowing how reticent I was at the art of socialisation – yet I could not say for certain, which part of me was eager if only for an excuse, and what voice in my heart was playing at caution.

There is a saying, I think, about paying the piper. I cannot remember the story – the only Western stories I had ever heard were two versions of the Pandora's jar story. They differed only in one minor detail: in the first version, which always made a greater impression to me, it was the spirit of foreboding which was trapped forever in the jar, and so humankind were free to hope for a better future.

In the other version, hope was never released to humankind.

I do not know if it was for the best. Anything would be better than waiting in misery, only to be let down. I strung out my tea, and it was only upon drinking cold dregs when I realised that I never gave Mr Nikiforov a definite answer, which made me feel worse for not knowing the next time when I would see him again.

* * *

 _ **Critiquez, s'il vous plaît !**_


End file.
